7/20/2007

Fucked New Orleans (A Series That Has No Hope of Ending):It's early-mid-hurricane season, and chances are that New Orleans will avoid the wet, windy smack this year. That's not a meteorological prediction; it's gambling odds, baby. So prayers and Ninas and Ninos aside, every year there's only a small chance that New Orleans will get washed out. But that doesn't mean that in ways big and small, every day brings more news of how New Orleans is fucked, yes, you know it can't be denied, fucked like a diapered David Vitter on his weekly visit to his favorite French Quarter whore.

For instance, the floodwall at the 17th Street Canal may be undermined by erosion. This is on the Metairie side of the canal, not the side that already was destroyed by flooding after Katrina. Apparently, the Army Corps of Engineers is trying to figure out what's causing "portions of the bank to cave in, or slough off." They hope to have the information they need to study by the end of the month. Then they'll study it, betting all the time that they don't get shat on by those long odds on another big-ass storm ripping through the floodwall like a charging rhino through wet tissue. And then they'll decide if erosion repair is their responsibility.

But the federal government's not really about taking responsibility when it comes to, well, shit, anything, and especially anything Katrina-related. A year ago, the Rude Pundit talked about a Sierra Club report on high levels of formaldehyde in FEMA trailers, used by tens of thousands of people in the post-Katrina hellscape of the Gulf Coast. Now, it seems, FEMA ignored calls to test the trailers itself because of possible liability if people get poisoned by the poison. And then FEMA withheld info from Congress on why people were getting sick in FEMA trailers. The director of FEMA said that more study is needed, but, hey, right now we've got a large scale experiment going on that'll demonstrate the long-term effects of formaldehyde exposure on children, so, on the balance, if you're in the Mengele school of medical studies, it's all good.

So let's just put this in perspective: you lived in New Orleans, believing that the levees and floodwalls were secure, but your house got wiped out because the levees were built on the cheap, and then, to make up for wiping out your house, the government gives you a trailer that can make you sick, not to mention the delays in getting insurance, loans, and grants to rebuild that wiped out house, and even if you rebuild after a couple of years of living in the poisonous trailer, there's a good possibility that most of your former neighbors won't rebuild. God bless America; laissez les bon-temps roulez.

(Note: The Rude Pundit will get back to discussing our general state of screwed in the USA on Monday, but since Keith Olbermann already said half of what the Rude Pundit was gonna say today, he's working on another angle. The Rude Pundit hates to be derivative.)